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The question is who funds these theoretical new studios? Indie studios more often than not have to make deals with the devil so they can eat. Then, even if their game is a smash hit, the investors take the lion’s share of profit and still control the actual devs by the purse strings. This society is sick.
It has been plenty unreasonable to work for AAA game companies for a long time. Long crunch, layoffs between projects, abuse by managers has been widespread for like 15 years at least. And attempts to remedy these issues with collective bargaining has been met with obvious union busting for several years at least.
Perhaps your definition of a golden age existed and had ended, but if so the end was longer ago than you think and we’re watching the end of an inevitable decline. You also have to compare this to everyone else’s conditions. The fact “gig economy” is even in our lexicon should show how unstable tons of people’s employment and income are.
He literally said they’re flooding the zone.
not leeching, Valve mostly lucked into this monopoly because of how grossly incompetent competition was at the time.
Just to be clear, the majority of the current competition is not only incompetent but actively malicious. The ones that don’t suck already have a toehold and I would like to see flourish because competition is good for everyone, but this picture you paint of steam is honestly ridiculous.
Thank you. I’m not against any of that, except maybe some definition needs to be applied to what is infra and what is store. For instance, a big part of what people like about steam is that they have reliable reviews. That would need to remain true with this split. I think there is a fine line to walk between enforcing interoperability and compromising or letting other companies leech on steam for no reason. You also seem to be implying that regardless of what store you purchase something on, you can access it from any other store because steam manages the licenses? Seems strange to me.
I epic hasn’t done anything but the bare minimum plus trying to buy their way into the market. Additionally, I don’t trust them a single bit. If they actually managed to get market share they should enshittify before you could blink.
I have even less nice things to say about all the other publisher run marketplaces.
GoG is cool because of their DRM policy and preservation. Steam provides labels for anticonsumer practices so consumers can be informed and does the cool stuff for Linux compatibility.
What exactly are you wanting regulators to do that you think will make people want to use EGS?
No, that sounds like moral panic bullshit. If the naked man is not in a sexual at all context because it’s straight up treating them as horses the whole game to be surrealist or whatever, and the kid was fully clothed, then I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. Perhaps it was worse than described, or maybe… There is something we don’t know
I guess you could say I’m impressed if we were discussing it like a beta preview of something that might be cool eventually. But what we’re doing is treating it like it’s amazing for all sorts of things it sucks at because it’s unreliable and shoving it in everything.
So yeah, I’m unimpressed with the reality vs the sales pitch.
It turns out that things are complicated, and that a company that is pro consumer in so many ways that almost nothing else is can get praised for that and denigrated for doing predatory loot boxes.
And that a billionaire owner can get praised for maintaining a pro consumer company and denigrated for running a loot box racket and buying yachts. All at the same time.
It’s so exhausting how people like you have to go on every thread and complain that people are happy about something instead of mad about everything, energy single time the company comes up.
sigh
Apocalypse is a sequel to the neutral route of iv
Edit: In case anyone seeing thinks I’m wrong because some weirdo down voted this, just look at wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_Megami_Tensei_IV%3A_Apocalypse
It is the sequel to Shin Megami Tensei IV, set in a post-apocalyptic alternative world.
Anytime I’ve ever complained about lootboxes/gacha/gambling mechanics, I’ve not been excluding valve. That said, there is a contingent of people that likes to chime in to conversations about steam to say people shouldn’t use steam because valve does lootboxes, and I don’t think it’s terribly relevant in those conversations.
If it’s like the last few trails game, it’s not really “you choose whether to play action or turn based” but “play action mode to build up a meter to get an advantage in turn based node when you switch” and you only spend 10 seconds or so in action mode, and also bosses don’t even have an action phase.
Yes? http://metroid.retropixel.net/games/metroid3/metroid3_map.gif
Notice how there is always one close to each boss.
I actually said I like the mega man version. I think the dark souls version is boring and doesn’t do anything of what you’re saying. I don’t even remember run backs from when I played half of hollow Knight because I didn’t even think the game was hard. It just wasted time in so many ways that I decided I’d rather play a different game that didn’t, but if people had to deal with the time wasting design that I remember and also do dark souls boss run backs then I’m not surprised they’re irritated.
Edit: and no I don’t think DS would be less iconic if you didn’t have to do boring runs between boss attempts…
The other day, I fought the boss of the abyss in the dark souls 1 dlc. It took me 5ish attempts, and I changed my gear to have more magic resist after I got further in the fight and got merked by magic attacks. All spending 2 minutes between each attempt running back to the fog gate did was make me zone out and wish I could just get right back to it.
Btw, the original runback was mega man, where you get to try the boss until you run out of lives then you have to do the entire level again. Still way more interesting than running past everything in souls games.
I’ll admit I don’t even remember doing runbacks in hollow Knight (or even having to fight any boss in the part of the game I played more than one or twice), but in other games where you have to run to the boss you normally just run past everything without fighting it and go into the boss with full resources. No challenge - just running past everything, which not only wastes time but also totally breaks immersion for me.
In any case, my overall discontent is with all the time wasting added together than any specific thing.
It’s true that I’d prefer it in no games, but it’s also less frustrating in straight soulslikes. The problem with HK is that it is a synthesis of metroidvania and soulslikes in the most time-disrespecting ways possible. Really most of my frustrations are with map design, and then they add not getting maps until you find the map guy (in samey environments I can’t remember well enough without a map).
What made me put it down was playing for an hour going through multiple zones without finding either a map guy or a bench somehow then dying. I’m pretty sure just being able to see the map would have been enough to keep me playing.
For this new fangled soulsvania genre there are numerous better entries that I thoroughly enjoyed. Ender Lilies and Blasphemus are the first 2 that come to mind.
A lot of comments tying runbacks to difficulty, when they have nothing to do with each other. I haven’t playing silksong but I played about half of the original and uninstalled it, despite the fact it is so many people’s favorite metroidvania and metroidvania is one of my favorite genres.
Not putting checkpoints close to boss fights is not difficulty. It is disrespectful of the player’s time, which is a problem hollow Knight was full of.
The majority of the field didn’t get crazy high salaries though (though they mostly did get to actually keep up with the cost of living while others didn’t). Since this is about game devs especially, the benefit they mostly got was getting to do the thing they were passionate about. I don’t remember a time when game developers didn’t have it shitty other than that.
Edit: also big tech companies were doing things like backroom anti poaching deals and other anti worker bullshit, so even the most privileged were getting fucked to some degree
Ehhh I know a lot of people that play indie games, but generally they only play one or two genres of them. Part of it is that the terminology gets confusing because people mean different things. Like, other than baldur’s gate, I couldn’t tell you the last western AAA game I played. But I played FF7 rebirth which is definitely AAA but not what people are always talking about when that talk about AAA sinking. There are also tons of studios that you probably wouldn’t call AAA but you also wouldn’t call indie. Like, I probably play more games from Falcom than any other studio. They’re not huge headcount-wise or cutting edge technology-wise but they’ve been consistently making games since the 80s. I think a lot of people don’t bucket those types of developers in their heads at all.